How to make a clock run for 10,000 years

High on a rocky ridge in the desert, nestled among the
brush, is the topmost part of a clock that has been ticking for
thousands of years.

It looks out over the ruins of a spaceport, built by a rich
man whose name was forgotten long ago.

Most of the clock is deep inside the mountain, below the
ridgeline. To get there, you hike for days through the heat; the
only sounds are the buzzing of flies and the whisper of the
occasional breeze. You climb up through the brush, then pass
through a hidden door into the darkness and silence of the clock
chamber. Far above your head, in the darkness, a massive pendulum
swings slowly back and forth, making the clock tick once every 10
seconds.

No one knows who built it, or why. They built it well, and
even now it keeps perfect time. All we know of these strange people
is that they were obsessed with the future.

Why else would they build something that had no purpose
except to mark time for thousands of years?

The rich man is Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, and he has indeed started construction on a clock that he hopes
will run for 10,000 years.

For Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, the clock is not just the
ultimate prestige timepiece. It's a symbol of the power of
long-term thinking. His hope is that building it will change the
way humanity thinks about time, encouraging our distant descendants
to take a longer view than we have.

For starters, Bezos himself is taking a far, far longer view
than most Fortune 500 CEOs.

"Over the lifetime of this clock, the United States won't
exist," Bezos tells me. "Whole civilisations will rise and fall.
New systems of government will be invented. You can't imagine the
world -- no one can -- that we're trying to get this clock to pass
through."

To help achieve his mission of fostering long-term thinking,
Bezos last week launched a website to
publicise his clock. People who want to visit the clock once
it's ready can put their names on a waiting list on the site --
although they'll have to be prepared to wait, as the clock won't be
complete for years.

It's a monumental undertaking that Bezos and the crew of people
designing and building the clock repeatedly compare to the Egyptian pyramids. And as with the pharaohs, it takes a certain
amount of ego -- even hubris -- to consider building such a
monument. But it's also an unparalleled engineering problem,
challenging its makers to think about how to keep a machine intact,
operational and accurate over a time span longer than most
human-made objects have even existed.

Consider this:10,000 years ago, our ancestors had barely begun
making the transition from hunting and gathering to simple agriculture,
and had just figured out how to cultivate gourds to use
as bottles. What if those people had built a machine, set it in
motion, and it was still running today? Would we understand how to
use it? What would it tell us about them?

And would it change the way we think about our own future?

The idea for the clock has been around since Danny Hillis
first proposed it in WIRED magazine in 1995. Since
then, Hillis and others have built prototypes and created a
nonprofit, the Long Now Foundation, to work on the clock and
promote long-term thinking. But nobody actually started building a
full-scale 10,000-year clock until Bezos put up a small portion --
$42 million, he says -- of his fortune.

Last year, contractors started machining components, such as a
trio of 8-foot (2.43 metres) stainless steel gears and the Geneva
wheels that will ring the chimes. Meanwhile, computers at Jet Propulsion Laboratories have spent months calculating the
sun's position in the sky at noon every day for the next 10,000
years, data that the clock will use to correct itself. This year,
excavation began on the Texas desert site where the clock will be
installed deep underground.

And just last month, the Smithsonian agreed to let the Long Now
Foundation install a 10,000-year clock in one of its Washington
museums, once they can find someone to fund it.

It seems that the time for millennium clocks has arrived.

The Project

Making a clock that will run for 10 millennia is no small
undertaking. In Texas, the builders have started drilling a
horizontal access tunnel into the base of the ridge where the clock
will live. They'll drill a pilot hole, 500 feet straight down from
the top of the ridge, until it meets the access tunnel. Then
they'll bring a 12-foot-7-inch bit into the bottom and drill it
back up, carving out a tall vertical shaft as it goes.

Afterwards, they'll install a movable platform holding a 2.5-ton
robot arm with a
stonecutting saw mounted on the end. It will start carving a spiral
staircase into the vertical shaft, from the top down, one step at a
time.

The clock, with massive metal gears, a huge stone weight, and a
precise, titanium escapement inside a protective quartz box, will
go deep into the shaft. A few years from now, the makers will set
it in motion.

Some day, thousands of years in the future, when Bezos and
Amazon and even the United States are nothing more than memories,
or less even than that, people may discover this clock, still
ticking, and scratch their heads.

Bezos says, "In the year 4000, you'll go see this clock and
you'll wonder, 'Why on Earth did they build this?'"

The answer, he hopes, will lead you to think more profoundly
about the distant future and your effects on it.

Here are some of the people who are creating the most temporally
ambitious mechanical engineering project in human history.

Comments

Why couldn't he have invested $42 million dollars in something to help ensure the human race will still be around 10,000 years from now? I can understand a few million for what is essentially a vanity project but not that crazy amount of money.

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Jun 24th 2011

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